What are you doing to make it better?

Posted by Meg Bear on April 13, 2010

Here’s the thing. Good employees do their job, great employees make their jobs better.

When I think about goal setting with my team, I am always asking them to set themselves a goal that will make something better than it was six months ago. Without this kind of thinking, you can easily get stuck in quarter-by-quarter survival and find yourself running in place, making no progress at all.

Of course, there is no affordance in your job description to make this easy. What I’m saying is that the system is rigged to keep you in the same spot, solving the same tactical issues, the same way, year after year. Your job is to not let that happen.

When you find a way, against odds, to make things better, you are able to get more done. When you get more done than your competition, bazinga you have found your way to greatness.

I’ve said this before, you are responsible for your own career. If you are not having the impact you could, find a way to fix it. If you don’t, someone else will, and you will always be wondering why you got left behind. The war for talent* strikes both ways, it is not exclusively a sellers market.